mbarrick | 2500 years of truth

I've been reading Plato's Republic (yeah, how many geek points do I get for that?) and a couple of passages made me chuckle:

On the concealment of wickedness for personal fame and fortune:

...the concealment of wickedness is often difficult; to which I answer, nothing great is easy. Nevertheless, the argument indicates this, if we would be happy, to be the path along which we should proceed. With a view to concealment we will establish secret brotherhoods and political clubs.

On the relative uselessness of salesmen:

...he will find people there who, seeing the want, undertake the office of salesmen. In well-ordered states they are commonly those who are weakest in bodily strength, and therefore of little use for any other purpose..."

And on the mental capacity of grunt labour:

And there is another class of servants [of the state], who are intellectually hardly on the level of companionship; still they have plenty of bodily strength for labour, which accodingly they sell, and are called... hirelings, hire being the name which is given to price of their labour.

How can anyone say this stuff isn't relevant to the here and now?